Salt and Burn (It's Firewhiskey, After All)
by evansentranced
Summary: Harry scoffs. "I killed Voldemort. Done." "No no no no no," Dean says, shoving Harry's glass at him. "No no no," he continues, just in case Harry hasn't caught on. "No. You drink up, buddy." Sam and Dean have a little downtime in the UK, courtesy of Cas, and end up meeting Harry Potter in a pub. Drinking games follow.


_ A/N: Set mid season 5, and Harry's in his late twenties._

* * *

Sam and Dean are in England. London, specifically.

"Heathrow is just a taxi ride away, Dean," Sam points out. "We have no idea when Cas is coming back."

"We'll get a motel. Shut up and drink your booze." Dean punctuates this statement by finishing off his pint.

They're in a hole in the wall on Charing Cross. Sam's never been to England, but he's pretty sure this place counts as weird by anyone's standards.

"Think there's a Ren faire nearby?" he asks, nodding his head toward all the people dressed in old fashioned robes and pointy hats. Dean rolls his eyes.

"No, this is just how wizards dress here."

Sam frowns, alarmed and confused. "Dean?"

Dean glances up at him, then looks more closely when he sees Sam's baffled expression. "What? You know about wizards."

"I know about witches, Dean," Sam says, lowering his voice. "And if we're sitting in the middle of a coven, it'd be nice for you to give me a heads up."

Dean blinks at him. "No, Sammy. Wizards. Whole different breed in Europe. Come on, I've heard you talking about it."

"When? When have I talked about English wizards?"

Dean waves his hand around impatiently. "You know, Dumbledore and Hermione Granger and all that."

Sam sets his pint on the sticky wooden table and stares. "Dean, those are fiction. Kid's books."

Dean leans forward and grins. "And Chuck's just making it up as he goes along, ain't he?"

Sam's jaw is still on the table when Dean gets impatient and leans out of their booth to stare around the bar.

"Hey, buddy!" he waves at a dark haired man talking to the bartender, who gives him a skeptical glance. Dean stands up and abandons Sam at the table to engage the guy in conversation. Inexplicably, the guy shrugs and follows Dean back to their table. Sam figures the round of whiskey Dean's carrying with him might have something to do with it.

"...if you're muggles?" The guy Dean brought back is waiting for an answer from Dean, looking at them through wire framed glasses and slightly messy dark hair. Sam thinks he's probably staring.

"I told you, we're not muggles," Dean says, irritated. "Pay attention, Merlin. We're hunters." Dean slides a glass of whiskey across the table to Sam and waggles his eyebrows with a grin. "Sam, this is Harry. Harry, Sam."

Sam is definitely staring. Harry takes his own glass and nods at Sam.

Sam finally remembers how to use his vocal chords and says, "Potter? Harry Potter?"

"Yes," Harry says, meeting Sam's eye and giving him a brief, practiced smile. "I suppose you aren't muggles, then."

"How'd you know his name?" Dean asks, frowning. He turns to Harry. "Are you in those books?"

Harry turns his head to look at Dean for a long minute. "I get one or two mentions," he says, looking vaguely amused. "Did you not read them?"

Sam hurries to speak up before Dean makes them both look like idiots. "Dean isn't a big reader. I-"

"Hey! I read," Dean interjects. "I just didn't think I'd need to know anything about English wizards since we work in America, so I didn't bother looking at that pile. Bobby's got them in his library somewhere."

Sam must be looking pretty incredulous, because Dean adds defensively: "And I've read the creature books. They've got some weird shit over here."

Harry's looking back and forth between them, definitely amused now.

"And," Dean continues, slugging back his drink and pausing to make a face at the empty glass. "Holy shit. He wasn't lying when he said firewhiskey. And," he continues, "I've heard the story, if you're that Potter guy."

Sam and Dean don't actually have anything to do at the moment, so they've had several rounds already. Sam takes a sip of his whiskey and realises it's probably worth at least four of the beers they've been drinking combined.

Harry drains half his glass, eyes it, then signals to the barman.

"If this is about to become one of those conversations, you're buying the next round too," he tells Dean, who agrees easily and even volunteers to go get the alcohol right then and there.

Sam takes a deep breath. "It's an honor to meet you," he says. Harry nods and drinks more of his whiskey. Sam huffs out a short laugh and shakes his head. "Sorry, I just need a minute to get over this. I thought you were just a character in a book series twenty minutes ago."

Harry shrugs. "It happens. If I wasn't okay with it, I wouldn't have signed the contract with Rowling."

Dean comes back with three shot glasses and a bottle and drops down into his seat. "Alright," he says. "I don't know how many hunters you've met, but if we're gonna do this, we're gonna do it right."

Confusion is the most obvious expression on Harry's face, and Sam takes pity on him.

"It's a drinking game hunters play," Sam explains. "We all go around the table and talk about our kills. If you can't come up with something better than the last person, you drink."

This explanation yields a long, slow blink from Harry, and a slight relaxation of his shoulders."Sounds fair."

"Great," Dean says, and goes first. "I iced the Seven Deadly Sins."

Harry's eyebrows shoot up, and Sam leans forward, waving his hands.

"Whoa whoa whoa! _We_ iced the Seven, and if Ruby hadn't been there, we woulda bought it."

"I took care of Lust on my own," Dean shoots back mutinously. "And it's not your turn, Sammy. Keep your trap shut."

They both look at Harry, who thinks for a second and says, "I killed a basilisk when I was twelve with the Sword of Gryffindor."

Dean whistles. "Nice."

And so it goes.

* * *

"Killed a hunter-turned-vampire by decapitating him with..." A pause for effect. "Barbed wire." Sam sets his full glass down on the table with finality. It's been a few hours, and they're all pretty wasted.

Dean laughs at the memory, but Harry isn't buying it. "How is that better than driving away a _hundred dementors_ with a single patronus? It's bloody not!"

"Gordon was a crafty bastard," Sam says, defending his position. "And once he turned, he was... he was a vampire! A crafty vampire!"

"Barbed wire, man," Dean agrees. "He just, he wrapped it around his neck, and..." He acts it out for them. "He just pulled. Just. Popped right off."

Harry's shaking his head though. "No, no! I mean, I agree, very well done, Sam," he says. "But that's not a hundred dementors. That's one vampire."

"A crafty vampire," Sam reminds him. Harry nods.

"A hundred _crafty_ dementors," he elaborates. "Every one of them, crafty, I promise you. All of them wanting to devour my soul _and_ my unconscious godfather's. And my other soul." He pauses, wrinkling his forehead. "I was time traveling at the time. There were two of me."

Dean and Sam exchange a look.

"Okay, fine," Sam says, and throws back his whiskey. Harry grins.

"Yeah, let's see you beat this one," Dean says. "I killed Azazel, the leader of a demon army, with the original demon-killin' Colt. Shot him right in the chest."

Harry scoffs. "I killed Voldemort. Done."

"No no no no no," Dean says, shoving Harry's glass at him. "No no no," he continues, just in case Harry hasn't caught on. "No. You drink up, buddy."

"It took years to kill that bastard!" Harry exclaims, refusing to take his drink with some offense. "I had to hunt down all the bits of his soul first. I nearly died on a weekly basis."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Dean says. "I'm crying a river of tears over here. We spent our entire lives hunting down old Yellow Eyes. He killed our mother."

"Voldemort killed both of my parents," Harry shot back. "And my godfather. And several close friends. And a lot of other people."

"You're preachin' to the choir, Luke," Dean says. "But I've heard the stories about you and that Voldenmort guy, and Azazel was harder."

Harry leans back in his seat and crosses his arms. "Let's hear it, then."

"All you had to do," Dean says, pointing a finger at Harry and slurring his words a little, "Is keep the guy out of a body while you went on your scavenger hunt. Slip him some poison every time he comes up with a new meatsuit. Shoot him in the head. Make it uncomfortable, you feel me?"

They've all had way too much firewhiskey for this conversation, Sam realises. He only clues in after he's already opened his mouth, though. "Yeah, I never understood why you didn't just get Snape to slip him a Draught of Living Death, and then take your time finding the other horcruxes."

"Yeah," Dean says, lifting his glass to Sam and taking a sip out of turn. "That's my little brother. Always usin' his giant noggin. I gotta say though," he continues, addressing Harry. "You didn't bring demons into it, and I respect that about you, dude. I woulda called you out for cheatin', anyway."

"We're not really being fair, Dean." Sam feels bad for ganging up on the poor guy. "He was a kid. You didn't kill Azazel when you were seventeen."

"Took out a full grown chupacabra when I was thirteen, though," Dean mutters. "And those vetala that one time, remember? ...and a whole buttload of ghosts."

Harry blinks owlishly at them. "Yeah? Well, all you had to do is not let a Brit take off with the only weapon you had that would kill your Yellow Eyes, and your job would've been done a lot faster."

Sam and Dean pause, feeling somewhat out of sorts.

"How'd you know about Bela?" Sam asks, once he realises what's so weird about what Harry just said. Harry grins.

"Teddy reads Supernatural," he says. "Luna picked him up a set of the first five when she was in Sweden a few years ago, and he got really into it. And since Teddy told me all about the Yellow Eyed demon, I can say with certainty that I win this round. I actually had to die to kill Voldemort. You screwed up and opened the Gates of Hell, if I remember correctly."

"Ouch," Sam says with relish. He's too drunk to be insulted at the moment. "Sorry Dean, I think he's got us there."

Dean glares and pushes his glass into the middle of the table. "I spent forty years in Hell, then broke out and accidentally started the Apocalypse."

Harry's eyebrows go up again. "Shit," he said. He voluntarily picks up both glasses and downs one after the other. "Is that where the books pick up? I heard they were going to start publishing again."

Dean grabs the bottle and takes a swig. "Fucking Chuck," he mutters. He cradles the bottle against his chest and slaps Sam's hand away when he tries to refill their glasses.

"So, this apocalypse," Harry ventures, a worried expression on his face. "How did you take care of that?"

Dean looks up from his whiskey with a shifty expression. Sam examines his hands very carefully.

"It's..." Sam says, making a face as he wonders how to phrase it. "It's a... work in progress."

"We're working on it," Dean repeats in response to Harry's obvious horror. "We've got an angel helping us out. Cas is a good guy when he's not being a total dick."

"Thank you, Dean."

It's Cas, and no one is shocked. Even Harry doesn't flinch, though Sam thinks he's probably used to people appearing at random, him being a wizard. Sam's next thought is that his life is entirely too surreal sometimes.

"It is time to return to Bobby's," Cas explains. Harry seems to take this as his cue, and stands.

"It's been interesting," he says, shaking Sam's hand, and Dean's once he gets his attention. "Feel free to send me an owl if you're in the area again." He pauses. "Or, actually, Hermione has a mobile, if it's easier to reach me that way."

He pulls out an actual quill and a scrap of what looks like parchment, and scribbles down a number. Sam takes it and stares at it a little, nodding.

"Thanks," he says, because Dean is too busy being drunk all over Cas, who is holding up pretty well under the pressure.

"Your damn tie, Cas," he's saying, managing to make the knot look even sloppier with his pawing.

"Bye then," Harry says, and waves before stumbling slightly over to the fireplace. The bartender helps him into the flames, calls out an address, and he's gone in a flash of green flames.

Sam stands stock still for nearly five seconds, then turns around and beams at Cas and Dean.

"We just met Harry Potter!" he exclaims, because really. It's exciting. Harry Potter!

"Yeah yeah, don't get your panties in a twist," Dean says. "Or knickers. It's knickers here, isn't it Cas?"

"Regional dialects are largely insignificant to my kind," Cas informs him. "Although I do not believe that the wizarding population of England utilizes undergarments."

Dean grimaces. "Let's just get back to Bobby's before I start picturing it."


End file.
